Sometime this year, Carl Franklin (Devil in a Blue Dress) will release Bless Me, Ultima, his first feature since 2003’s Denzel Washington-led thriller Out of Time. Which, really, is just a simple way of saying he’s been out of the movie game for a spot of time — and, now, it would seem as though his extended stay in TV land is coming to an end.

TheWrap reports that he’s been hired for City of Night, a David Chisholm-penned “Los Angeles-based thriller” that McDonald Entertainment and Meyers Media Group will be financing. How Franklin gets to put his name to the city isn’t evident right now, though the “thriller” aspect is a little clearer; City revolves around rookie cop Emmett Conlin, who gets thrust into the “toughest crime unit” the LAPD has to offer, and is soon “drawn into a web of deceit and corruption that threatens his job and his life.”

I only bring up the issue of “using” Los Angeles because, as history clearly shows, it’s a city with the kind of design and underworld that can really take a filmmaker miles — just look at multiple works of Michael Mann or, very recently, Nicolas Winding Refn‘s Drive. I know nobody’s going to make the case that Franklin is on the same level as either, but if he is, in fact, a smart director, he’ll take advantage of the environment in which he’s operating.